Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

To Serve God and Wal-Mart panel discussion at NYU

November 20, 4-8pm at NYU's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis:

A panel discussion and book party for Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (reviews: Bookforum, NYTBR, The Big Money) and Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century.

            

 

Host: Lisa Duggan (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU)

Kathryn Bond Stockton on The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, with comment by Professor José Muñoz (Performance Studies, NYU).

Bethany Moreton on To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise, with comment by Professor Nikhil Pal Singh (Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU).

Moderator: Michael Cobb (English, University of Toronto)

Books will be available for sale from Bluestockings Bookstore.

Co-sponsors: NYU Departments of Social & Cultural Analysis, American Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, History, Performance Studies, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.

Greil Marcus - "Lipstick Traces Live" @ Columbia November 19

See Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, released this year in a new twentieth anniversary edition, as well as The Dustbin of History, In the Fascist Bathroom, The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books, not to mention co-editor of A New Literary History of America, out and making the rounds presently, deliver a "lecture as performance" live at Columbia University. "Lipstick Traces Live" is based on material from the book and will take place November 19 at 6pm, with a signing to follow.

click on flyer for full-sized image

More details here.

The Idea of Justice

 From The Economist:

In the courtliest of tones, Mr. Sen charges John Rawls, an American philosopher who died in 2002, with sending political thinkers up a tortuous blind alley. The Rawlsian project of trying to describe ideally just institutions is a distracting and ultimately fruitless way to think about social injustice, Mr. Sen complains. Such a spirited attack against possibly the most influential English-speaking political philosopher of the past 100 years will alone excite attention. The Idea of Justice serves also as a commanding summation of Mr. Sen's own work on economic reasoning and on the elements and measurement of human well-being...Mr. Sen writes with dry wit, a feel for history and a relaxed cosmopolitanism...The Idea of Justice is a feast...Nobody can reasonably complain any longer that they do not see how the parts of Mr. Sen's grand enterprise fit together...Mr. Sen ends, suitably, with democracy. It can take many institutional forms, he says. But none succeeds without open debate about values and principles. To that vital element in public reason, as he calls it, The Idea of Justice is a contribution of the highest rank.

||| The Idea of Justice is available now from HUP and at your favorite bookstore.

Reprise -- Kennedy, Dukakis, Patrick read the letters of John and Abigail

Since we're publishing this month a collection of the wit and wisdom of one of our most formidable and literate First Ladies, thought we would re-post a link to the video of an event we put on in 2007 to celebrate the publication of My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, in which we solicited the help of a few of Massachusetts's most well-known contemporary public servants, including Governor Deval Patrick, former Governor Michael Dukakis, and the late Senator Edward Kennedy, in sharing some of John and Abigail's most revealing and affecting correspondence. Video courtesy of Boston's WGBH.

||| The Letters of John and Abigail Adams -- Faneuil Hall, November 17, 2007.

Michael Hardt discusses Commonwealth - September 17, NYC

[click image for full size]

Michael Hardt is the author, with Antonio Negri, of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. Commonwealth is available from HUP late-September 2009.

Du Bois the political philosopher

Just got the first finished copies of an exciting book from our Fall list. With In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America, Robert Gooding-Williams describes the contours of a distinctly Afro-modern tradition in American political thought and examines Du Bois’s own orientation to that tradition, one to which, as both theorist and practitioner, Du Bois considered himself rightful heir. In this, the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Gooding-Williams, Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, takes Du Bois’s landmark work, The Souls of Black Folk, and subjects it to the same sort of rigorous analysis we often reserve for Locke, Kant, and Rousseau—the “classic” theorists of the social contract tradition. But Souls, in Gooding-Williams’s opinion, constitutes a contribution to American political philosophy that’s as important as the work of those better-known thinkers, all the more so since we find it rooted in and framed explicitly as a response to the distinctly American system of racial apartheid that went under the name Jim Crow.

Gooding-Williams places Du Bois in a long line of contributors to what he calls the “Afro-modern” strain in American political thought, a line that includes Equiano, Delany, Crummell, James, Fanon, and Rodney. But most crucially, it includes Frederick Douglass, whom Du Bois considered his intellectual forefather and who stood as one of the progenitors of the tradition of “assimilation through self-assertion” to which Du Bois considered himself heir. In setting himself up thusly, Du Bois was able to enlist Douglass’s ideas against what he considered to be inferior responses to segregation and white supremacy, such as the “assimilation through submission” ethos that he decried in his now-famous attack on Booker T. Washington, the outlines of which reverberate to this day.

Indeed, in subjecting Du Bois’s thought to the critical analysis it deserves, Gooding-Williams is able to reveal the degree to which modern discourse on race in America takes the shape that Du Bois gave it, and, further, to question the usefulness of some of the more problematic aspects of Du Bois’s philosophy in the debates on race that continue to occur. As the principal theoretical defense of the “politics of uplift” that animated the ideas of African American elites throughout much of the twentieth century, Souls is as much with us today as it ever was. By utilizing Du Bois’s work as an interpretive lens through which to view Afro-modern political thought, and the competing strains within it, as part of a distinct and distinctly American philosophical tradition, Gooding-Williams shows us how we have, perhaps unwittingly, been doing the same thing all along.

||| In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America

“Revolutions” and the Politics of Networks

... with special reference to the role played by the internet during the recent developments in Iran.

A few posts back, I talked up a new book by former software designer David Golumbia on the repressive potential of the computational turn in culture and society. The Cultural Logic of Computation stands counterposed to the pronouncements of the techno-evangelists who dominate media discourse around the cultural and political potential of computing. In short, Golumbia's thesis is that computers enable the exercise of already-existing power much more fully than they provide the masses with means to distribute or contest it. During a recent e-mail conversation, we asked Golumbia what he thought of the idea, promoted by many in the media, that the use of services like Twitter has fundamentally changed the nature -- and the chances for success -- of political dissent aimed at creating more open and democratic societies. Here's what he had to say.

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Few words have been heard more often lately than revolution. The word occurs in two ways, but the connection between them is at best fuzzy. First, commentators wonder if Iran is going through a political revolution. Second, they speculate about an “internet revolution”—not merely a change in communications technologies, but something more significant for democracy, for political organization.

Jeff Jarvis calls it “the API revolution” (referring to the ability, via software called an API, to for third-parties to “use” other applications—for mobile phone providers, for example, to route messages onto Twitter). Clay Shirky calls it “the big one”:

... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.

When Shirky said this it was still plausible that the revolution in Iran would “take.” It didn’t. And what Shirky says about the benefits of “the big one” are odd: “people … are engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on messages to their friends.” I am absolutely positive that these have been critical aspects of every political revolution, regardless of technology. So what does Twitter change? “The whole world is watching.” Well, we outside Iran can watch in much more detail than we could before. But since when is external observation an important part of revolution? It can help. But “we” have watched many failed revolutions from the outside. Does “our” knowing more of the details of the failure really change the situation?

At the very least, the failure of the Iranian revolution shows that the thesis that “network openness” leads automatically or directly to democracy is false—we have plenty of network openness, we keep celebrating it, and yet all we saw in practice was a near-revolution very similar to hundreds we have seen in the past. Other than the evidence we see on computer screens—other than the Twitter feeds and Neda YouTube videos—what actually changed in the process of or progress toward revolution in any substantive fashion?

The point I hope to make here, and one that I make at greater length in my book The Cultural Logic of Computation, is that so many of our commentators appear to live in a world where the equation between positive political change and network openness, or technological evolution, is so obvious as to be transparent. The hidden and most dangerous underside of this is that the only politics such people want most to examine are the liberatory potentials they have already decided are there.

As Chris Rhoads and Loretta Chao discuss in an article this week in the Wall Street Journal, though—raising issues that are well known to those of us who pay close attention to what governments and businesses do with computer networks—the fact is that the Iranian government is using the network to surveil its citizens, to anticipate their plans, to identify dissidents, and to counter them. In an interview on NPR, Rhoads explained what seems never to occur to the techno-evangelists: Iran has kept the internet open because it provides them with much richer information to spy on its citizens.

I am not suggesting and not hoping that we see a new generation of Clay Shirkys and Jeff Jarvises who blog exclusively about the advent of a new, real Big Brother. But there is a reason that it was a former Bush national security advisor who suggested, amidst the revolution-that-failed, that the Twitter developers deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, when in fact Twitter is being used to control and monitor dissidence. We have to find a way to explore in a sober way the political consequences of all parts of the computerization of the world, whether they fit or do not fit with our own hopes, and even to resist those parts of computerization that ultimately do not serve democratic ends.

White House joins blog fray

Via Braniac, we learn that White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag has got a blog, and he's using it to engage commentators and critics, including our own Richard Posner (link | link | link), on the question of how, in these trying economic times, we are going to pay for health care reform.

||| "Debating Health Care" at the OMB Blog

Global academic reaction to Obama's Cairo speech

After the President's long-awaited and much-discussed speech in Cairo last week, we solicited the reactions of several current and forthcoming HUP authors, many of whom hail from the Muslim world. We may not have hit first news cycle with this, but instead of "instant analysis" (oxymoron?), we're in the business of taking the long and considered view. A fantastic range of perspectives here and I suspect you will find some takes that are going to be missing from the mainstream media coverage of "what it all means."

||| HUP authors react to Obama's Cairo speech

Mexican migration to US way down

So says the New York Times after a review of Mexican census figures. The main pull factor -- jobs -- has basically disappeared for the time being.

One of the leading academic voices on undocumented migration has just published a book with us. Jacqueline Maria Hagan is the author of Migration Miracle: Faith, Hope, and Meaning on the Undocumented Journey, in which she examines the role of faith and spirituality in shaping the migration and settlement experiences of contemporary immigrants. It's a story as old as America (remember the Pilgrims? Or a little place called Utah?), and by connecting the dots between our oldest immigrants and our newest ones, Hagan takes the story of undocumented immigration off the newspaper page and out of the mouth of the cable news shouter and presents it as the intensely human experience that it is for those who undertake the journey.

Hagan spoke recently at the Annapolis Book Festival; you can catch her appearance on C-SPAN's Book-TV this Sunday.